But over most of this time he has continued to make work, and his current show at Cristin Tierney gives some sense of what Burgin, now seventy-five, has been up to in recent years.
Consisting of two silent, sumptuous, and somewhat ponderous digital projections, the exhibition is titled Midwest in reference to the central swath of the US. (Born in Sheffield, Burgin has always kept an eye on goings-on in the States, and another body of work, US 77, is currently up at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia.) While this is suggestive territory to map in an election year, Burgin’s videos are far removed from current exigencies: instead they depict desert flats, eerie interiors, startling rock formations, modern architecture. Prairie (2015) tells the tale of Mies van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of Technology campus in Chicago, and the destruction of an apartment building called the Mecca, while Mirror Lake (2013) looks at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin and the native peoples who once inhabited nearby land. Each offers a combination of text and high-definition image, often computer generated. Invested in architectural ornament, which they treat as the bearer of social relations turned into form, the videos are intriguing, but they give off the strange air of an academic exercise. The shift in Burgin’s work from the mid-1970s to today seems bound up with changing conceptions of photography, as well as a changed treatment of architecture. His early work engaged the architectural space where art is presented and understood the photograph as a physical index of the object it depicted, a certain mode of documentary, which it placed alongside other realities. Here the real occurs in a specifically digital form of imagination. Moreover, while the earlier work maintained an agonistic relationship to the gallery, here, with the white cube turned into a black box, it simply feels ambiguous: these enlarged PowerPoints could happily loop on any number of screens, and yet their target remains unclear.
